Making Peace

By Susan McKinney de Ortega

Andrés plucks one of the plastic Corona chairs from the stack in the corner and places it next to his two half-brothers. When Andres sits, they stand - wide Benjamín who they call Banjamón and Miguelito, who at twenty-seven still answers to Bebé and without a glance, move to the opposite side of the room.

Andrés rubs the scar on his face absently with his thumb. In his shadow on the wall, cast by a dozen votive candles, he looks like a man thinking. So this is the way it will be, Andrés on his side of the room, his brothers on the other, separated by their mother’s casket.

Andrés’ cheek has been scarred since he was eleven, when his brothers attacked him with a broken Coke bottle. Probably because he has a different father, he’s always thought. They’ve never spoken about it.

His two aunts - his father’s sisters - are in the room, grey and plump now. Neither has ever married. They’ve lived together in the house his father always claimed was a third his. For thirty-one years, his aunts have sided with his mother, and not spoken to their brother, angry still that before his, Andrés’ birth, his father, Mariano left his mother for another woman.

Andrés lived in that house with the aunts a year and a half, after the bottle attack, when things with his brothers had gone from bad to worse, and his mother had been powerless to intervene. Andrés dreamed of having his own house, and at seventeen, he rented one, two small rooms actually. He woke at six, ran four miles, went to the market for a fruit liquado, and spent the rest of the morning in karate. In the afternoon, he ran again, went to the gym and gave three hours of personal defense classes, and in the evening, he watched his small television curling hand weights toward his shoulders.

Andrés took security jobs in bars. Come nights, Andrés stood by doorways, clasping his hands behind him, looking like nobody, like a dark guy with slicked back hair and a scar on his face, until some hotheaded kid who’d ordered an entire bottle of rum would lurch toward him, taunting, pissed off that Andrés looked so implacable - some jerk standing around a bar without even a drink in his hand!

Andrés would stand unmoving, willing the drunk - some rich kid wearing a shell choker to look like a hippie - just willing the kid to touch him, and invariably the kid would, a three-fingered poke in the chest, balancing himself by swinging out the hand that choked a Bacardí bottle by the neck, and then a reflexive little tilt back on his heels, just in case this fool who comes to a bar to play statue might think of poking him back.

Andrés, who teaches defensive fighting, whose whole carriage says ‘non-aggression’, lives for this moment. In one and one-half seconds, the rich hippie is on his back, mouth wide open, trying to pull air into his lungs, not comprehending that what he is looking at are ceiling beams. He thinks he’s had a heart attack- he is beginning to figure out he is on the floor, and there is a great pain in his chest. Only when he manages to lift his head, peel it up from the floorboards like a cartoon character, does he see that the pain comes from the knee of the scarfaced statue, pressing into his heart, pinning him flat.

Benjamón and Bebé still live at home, con mi mamá is what Andrés almost thinks. But now they are two men in their late twenties living alone in what must be their home. Andrés wonders if his mother ever bothered to make a will, or change the house to their name. She wasn’t good at taking care of details. She’d always meant to marry his father in the courts, she’d told Andrés, but they’d only ever managed to go before a priest, so that when he ran off with that woman, leaving her pregnant, it was too hard- she spent all her time sleeping and feeding herself shrimp and agua de miel for a healthy embarazo, and she didn’t have the energy to sue him for child support. So the blankety-blank never supported him at all, his mother made sure to tell Andrés throughout his life. Pinche good-for-nothing.

What nobody sitting around the casket knows is that what his mother told him is not true. That his father, Mariano, has all his life supported him in many ways, none of which had to do with handing his mother money.

That when Andrés played on that ragtag soccer team from age eight to twelve, Mariano was the one who met him at the edge of the neighborhood, and walked him, along with his other sons, Andrés’ half-brothers, to the field. And that often after school, he would eat at Mariano’s and Luz’s house - Luz’s chiles rellenos, her nopales con chile cascabel, her meatballs and rice were better than anything his own mother ever made. And that now, sometimes on Sundays he visits his half-sister Gloria, their children being around the same ages, and that sometimes Luz and Mariano are there, and they all sit around the table and eat Gloria’s mole together. Or that his half-brothers, Gabriel, got him a job teaching afternoon karate classes at his kids’ private school! So consumed by thirty-one year’s worth of anger, how would they know? Neither his mother nor his aunts ever wanted to hear his father’s name spoken out loud (although they had the right to mention it in some disparaging comment themselves.)

When Andrés moved out from his mother’s house, he noticed that she lived in the north half of the town, Luz and Mariano lived in the west. The room he found was located in the southeast. His mother used the markets on her side of town, Luz bought fruit and visited the pollerias in the western neighborhoods. Andrés had mapped out his territory well. Just as planned, he saw the various members of his family infrequently, only when he crossed into their sections.

When he was twenty-two, Andrés collapsed and was hospitalized. He’d come in from running, and was in the kitchen, squeezing oranges in the hand squeezer, his wife, Sonia at her office. He’d turned the shower on to let the water get hot. He’d just lifted the glass from the counter when he felt himself go cold. Then he was shivering uncontrollably, orange juice splattering as the glass tipped back and forth. Andrés willed himself to lower the glass, and in the next second he was on the floor. If Sonia hadn’t come home to get some files!
Exhaustion from extreme amounts of exercise, doctors said. He was pierced with a needle, suero dripped into his veins, told to buy vitamins. They kept him in the hospital three days to rest with Sonia’s blessing. She didn’t believe, if he came home, he’d
manage to sit in the house all day without hoisting some weights, or tying on his running shoes.

When he left. She’d always put it that way. But now that his mother is gone, Andrés is free to think about events clearly. Pregnant and abandoned was his mother’s story, cheated on and left by the no-good. But Banjamón is lighter than he, and has always held that his father is the second one, the one who actually lived in the house with them until Andrés was five, before he disappeared forever. The second no-good that skipped. So his father walked when his mother was pregnant by another man. Andrés thinks he probably would have done the same.

“Make peace, as I have,” his mother whispered to Andrés on her deathbed in the Sanatorio on Calle Hidalgo. The nurses used to look like white nuns - long modest dresses and caps. Now they are teenagers who are congratulated by their families for finishing middle school; multiple earrings and boredom.

“What do you mean, you’ve made peace?” Andrés whispered back.

“With your father. He came to see me,” she said, and her eyelids had stopped fluttering wearily, and she’d looked straight at him.

“Sí, Ma,” he’d said in a clear voice, not telling her even then, that he’d made peace with his father some twenty-five years ago, when Mariano had showed up at his school when he was in first grade, and said, “Son, I’ll walk you home.”

“And with your brothers,” she’d pleaded.

“Ma,” he had said non-commitedly, which had seemed to satisfy her. She’d patted his hand.

His brothers - what use does he have for them? Bebé opened and closed his taco stand in the space of six months, whining it was too much labor. And Benjamón, thinking it was his life’s work to sit around his mother’s house and eat her food. Let the two of them figure out how to feed themselves now. Let them have the house that is rightfully one third his.

Over on his plastic Corona chair, Bebé is dressed in shiny black dress pants and a black, brown, and white shirt printed in swirling patterns like galaxies, still fancying himself a business owner. Benjamón, round and pink like a ham, picks at a fingernail, both pretending Andrés is not in the room, not understanding how lucky they are that Andrés’ philosophy is ‘don’t strike first’, that he could if he wanted, with a swift series of kicks, leave them senseless within seconds.

Next to his brothers, his aunts’ hips spill out the sides of their chairs. Andrés, alone on his side of the room, stands and goes into the kitchen to get a glass of water.

He hears a strange voice while he is holding a plastic cup under the garaphone spout. The voice is asking for him.

When Andrés enters the room, he sees the backs of his brothers’ and aunts’ heads. They are staring at a good-looking man in the door. With a start, Andrés realizes it is the adult version of his half-brother, Gabriel, hair combed back, khaki slacks and a button-down shirt, the dark skin they share from their father, the heavily lashed eyes.

Even though Andrés sees Gaby at his kids’ school every week, when he thinks of him the picture in his head is still of a dirty-faced boy, the quietest of Luz and Mariano’s bunch - a kid who drew pictures of the Aztecs and Spaniards fighting in the dirt, a good soccer player.

Andrés has never felt a real part of any family - not his mother’s with two half brothers who haven’t spoken to him in twenty years, not his aunts’ where he was fed well but had to listen to a litany of his father’s sins as he ate his soup, not Luz and Mariano’s where the other six kids all slept in one room together and he was only the brother who sometimes came to visit. Although he remembers Luz’s house with some affection. Nobody made a fuss when he showed up. His brothers and sisters just moved over on the long bench and Luz would place a bowl of frijoles and chopped onion in front of him como nada. His own mother, while he was eating at Luz’s, wouldn’t know where he was and wouldn’t wonder. He was like a shadow in his mother’s house, ghosting in to sleep, first pushing a box filled with hand weights in front of his door to fend off further sibling attacks, then after a year of karate, leaving the door open like a taunt, waiting for one of his brothers to come in with a broken bottle again, or a knife.

Andrés sees uncertainty on Gabriel’s face - am I in the right place? and recognizes the feeling that has driven him his whole life, driven him to be what he is at this moment a trim, self contained black belt champion sitting unflappably at his mother’s wake, seemingly unbothered by his brothers’ hostile silence, his aunts’ poisonous family sentiments.

“Who are you?” Tia Lorena asks, chin lifted authoritatively but Andrés hears the tremor in her voice.

“I’m Andrés’ brother,” Gabriel says, stepping into the room.

Tia Lorena gasps and the brothers blink stupidly. Andrés feels a strange lightness - a feeling he can’t name, and then he does. Support. He’s never felt family backing in such a flesh and blood way before.

He pulls a white plastic Corona chair from the top of a stack and places it next to the seat he’s just vacated, feeling the eyes of his relatives upon him.